Spy school 🔦
"Sometimes you gotta just chill. You gotta chill your thinking process."
—Ghostface Killah
> in my eyes | a terrible mistake
I studied journalism and media in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. We were required to attend courses in other disciplines.
During my second year, I crossed campus for a class taught by a retired CIA operative at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
- Led by our Hollywood professor, we discussed the unforeseen consequences of cognitive biases and thinking lapses and fallacies on intelligence analysts operating in the classified world. 👀 🔍
The nation's sprawling intelligence agencies are responsible for reporting to Congress and the president about potential threats to U.S. national security.
One such threat is our own intelligence analysts and operatives.
Our course textbook goes on at length about the dangers of misperception and need for objectivity:
>> "Analysts need training to learn how to recognize when they have strong biases on issues they are writing about and to filter out their views, especially when they run counter to the intelligence at hand or the policies being considered."
Beware the mind's natural, blundering, subjective tendencies. It's easy to casually dismiss America's foes as monolithic, unintelligent, and unsophisticated.
But to "put yourself in their shoes" is to risk "a terrible mistake," our course textbook says.
Now you're just yourself in a different pair of shoes that happens to belong to Vladimir Putin.
Now you're at risk of overlooking important differences between the United States and Russia in national identity, rationale, perception, and culture:
>> "Analysts are listened to because of their accumulated expertise, not the forcefulness of their views. … The need for objectivity is so great and so pervasive that it should be taken as a given. If the intelligence is not objective, then none of the other attributes – timeliness, digestibility, clarity – matter."
- next time "Feelings aren't facts."
- listening Geto Boys "Mind Playing Tricks on Me"
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